Design and Validation of a Grid-based Home Detection via Stay-Time (GHOST) Software for Mobile Location Data

Abstract: Accurately detecting home locations from GPS data generated by mobile devices is a foundational step in human mobility research, with significant implications for transportation planning, public health, and emergency response. However, existing home detection algorithms often produce unreliable results for noisy real-world data and are barely validated due to a lack of ground-truth benchmarks. To tackle these limitations, this study presents the development and validation of a Grid-based home detection via Stay-Time (GHOST) algorithm, implemented as an open-source Python package. The algorithm infers proxy home locations by identifying the most frequently visited nighttime or weekend daytime grid cells based on customizable spatial and temporal filters. To validate its performance, we use the large-scale BostonWalks dataset, which includes over 155,000 trips from 377 participants in the Boston metropolitan area, to test robustness to noisy data. Additionally, we collected a ground-truth dataset for ten volunteers across different regions in the U.S., including Florida, Mississippi, and Colorado, along with their self-reported home coordinates, to evaluate GHOST across diverse mobility patterns and sampling conditions. We compared GHOST accuracy to that of 5 well-established home detection algorithms: All-time clustering method, Stay-point method, DBSCAN, K-MEANS++, and SciKit-Mobility Home Detection, across multiple parameter settings. Results show that GHOST outperforms all algorithms in accuracy and robustness, with average errors as low as 22.3 meters under optimal configurations. Our findings highlight the high accuracy and flexibility of our algorithm, with grid size being the most influential parameter during validation, demonstrating the potential of this algorithm for real-world mobile location data analysis.